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You can spin up cloud infra in claude code by just having it write IaC code. It's very good at this.

I do with it Pulumi, bc you can write some python or typescript for your infrastructure. But there are many infrastructure as code tools to choose from.


Yes, you can and definitely should use Pulumi or other cloud infra for production use cases. The way I envisioned cloudrouter was to give coding agents throwaway VMs, use it to close the loop on its task, and then stop/delete it afterwards...

The book "All the Colors of the Dark" has a plot line around rare purple honey being a sort of treasure map to a place in North Carolina. I thought it was an odd made-up plot point.

I guess it turns out it was not.

Despite not liking that part of the plot, it was a beautifully written book, that permanently changed some of my reading habit's.


Matt is amazing. After checking out his compiler optimizations, maybe check out the recent interview I did with him.

    What I’ve come to believe is this: you should work at a level of abstraction you’re comfortable with, but you should also understand the layer beneath it.

    If you’re a C programmer, you should have some idea of how the C runtime works, and how it interacts with the operating system. You don’t need every detail, but you need enough to know what’s going on when something breaks. Because one day printf won’t work, and if the layer below is a total mystery, you won’t even know where to start looking.

    So: know one layer well, have working knowledge of the layer under it, and, most importantly, be aware of the shape of the layer below that.
https://corecursive.com/godbolt-rule-matt-godbolt/

Also this article in acmqueue by Matt is not new at all, but super great introduction to these types of optimizations.

https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3372264


The “understand one layer below where you work” is something my professors at uni told us 10+ years ago. Not sure where that originated from, but I really think that benefited me in my career. I.e understanding the JVM when dealing with Java helped optimize code in a relatively heavyweight medical software package.

And also, it’s just fun to understand the lower layers.


https://cacm.acm.org/research/always-measure-one-level-deepe... This has been a classic repeat in my grad classes.


Awww thanks again Adam :blush:


My standard question to all Experts ;-)

What are some articles/books/videos that you would recommend to go from beginner-to-expert in your domain ?


I actually wrote a blog post about it and checked lower level abstractions for web developers: https://yncui.com/post/lower_level_abstractions_for_web_deve...


I did find beads helpful for some of this multi-context window tasks. It sounds a little like there is some convergence between what they are suggesting and how it give you light weight sub tasks that survive a /clear.


Love the show!

> It sounds a little like there is some convergence between what they are suggesting and how it give you light weight sub tasks that survive a /clear.

I do see the convergence there. Beads gives you that "state that survives `/clear`," and Anthropic’s harness tries to do something similar at a higher level.

I've been thinking about this with a pretty simple, old-school analogy:

You're at a shop with solid engineering and ticketing practices. You just hired a great junior developer. They know the stack, maybe even the domain basics, but they don't yet know:

- Your business processes

- The quirks of your microservices

- Local naming conventions, standards, etc.

- Team norms around testing, logging, and observability

You trust them with important tasks, but expect their context will frequently get blown away by interruptions, meetings, task-switching, and long weekends. T handle this, need to make sure each ticket or note contains enough structured info so that when they inevitably lose context, they can pick right back up.

For each ticket, you'd likely include:

- Personas and user goals

- Acceptance criteria, Given/When/Then scenarios

- Links to specs, documentation, related tickets, or prior art

- A short summary of their current understanding

- Rough plan (steps, what's done/not done)

- Decisions made and their rationale ("I chose X because Y")

- Open questions or known gotchas

End of day Friday, that junior would ideally leave notes that answer: "If I have total amnesia next Tuesday, what's the minimum needed to quickly reload my context?"

To me, agent harnesses like Anthropic's or Beads are just formalizing exactly this pattern:

- `/clear` or `/new` is like a "long weekend brain wipe."

- Persistent subtasks or controllers become structured scaffolding.

- The crucial piece isn't remembering everything, just clearly capturing intent, decisions, rationale, and immediate next steps.

My confusion about Anthropic’s approach is why they're doing this over plain text files or JSON, instead of leveraging decades of existing tracker and project-management tooling—which already encode this exact workflow and best practice.


I've found it pretty useful as well. It doesn't compete with gh issues as much as it competes with markdown specs.

It's helpful for getting Claude code to work with tasks that will span multiple context windows.


My 2 cents on BQN: I am certainly a novice with array languages, but I know they have conceptual power.

    Looking for a modern, powerful language centered on Ken Iverson's array programming paradigm

    BQN aims to remove irregular and burdensome aspects of the APL tradition, and put the great ideas on a firmer footing.
And BQN seems like the closest thing to a 'modern' array language. Modern, meaning, looking like my biased version of what language should look like.

Open source, has namespaces, and you can define your own operators and so on.

Heard of it from conor hoekstra


Looks cool.

But isn't Hugo or Jekyll the easy way to turn markdown into a website?

Jekyll was literally made by github to have a simple way to turn a markdown page into a github pages site. Wasn't it?

Just put an index.md in the root of a empty repo and flip the right flags in Github and have a static site.


I actually previously used Jekyll! Built this largely because I want full React component functionality sometimes. Also I think Jelyll gave me some issues with routing that I didn’t like.


> In the early days of FedEx, Smith had to go to great lengths to keep the company afloat. In one instance, after a crucial business loan was denied, he took the company's last $5,000 to Las Vegas and won $27,000 gambling on blackjack to cover the company's $24,000 fuel bill.

Some who take on unreasonable risk will be among the most successful people alive. Most will lose eventually, long before you hear about them if they keep too many taking crazy risks.

Who is a great genius, and is who is just winning at "The Martingale entrepreneurial strategy"?


You know, it only just now occurs to me to wonder if the blackjack story is the public sanitized version of "how I got $24k because I'm not allowed to tell you the real version"


Great thought, that seems very likely since so many "founder stories" are heavily spun tales.


Las Vegas still had deep mafia ties in the 1970s so that’s very possible.


What this version of the FedEx story doesn't mention is that Fred was already stiffing his pilots on their salaries. Taking the last money in the company and deciding that the best use for it was the blackjack table in Vegas and not paying his employees ... worked well, but it was a gamble, let's be clear, not a calculated decision - like you say, not the decision of a "great genius". It goes a different way, and you have "FedEx founder decides to go gambling, leaving his employees without paychecks".


If your marginal utility of money increases with more, it's a rational decision to go to a casino and gamble.


The casino is an extremely rational savings model if you expected to constantly be robbed and want to convert small (and thus not worth robbing) income streams into occasionally large sums of money to be spent rapidly. I.e. say you are a north korean worker in China/Russia and you occasionally get small change to spend on cigarettes, you could gamble it every 'paycheck' and eventually buy a phone to escape with the winnings.

Filipinos have a more predictable low-loss version of this call Paluwagan.


It can also be a way to evade capital controls. You know you'll lose, but otoh you also know you'll probably not lose _everything_ and you buy in with RMB and cash out in HKD.


What makes prompts like 'you are a book researcher' an agent?

Isn't this just some loops and joining with some changes in prompts?

Can't you write this in a for loop calling the open AI API directly?


Yes. Calling prompts in a for loop is what makes an agent. Usually tool calls are also involved.


> simultaneously extremely similar to and extremely different

yeah, I don't understand the change tbh.

It's said Eric Heisserer spent years and years on the screenplay so I'm assuming he couldn't sell the original version. But it's a bit like making fight club and removing the big reveal. It ends up feeling the same, but not having the same impact and meaning almost the opposite.


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